Nice to see the number one story in the Observer this week was ‘Viruses save a man from antibiotic-resistant bacteria’, in which a 69-year-od American is brought out of a coma and has his life saved by an injected cocktail of bacteriophages.

The story appears just 16 years after we wrote about phages in the first edition of The Solutions Focus, as an illustration of the SF principle, ‘Every case is different.’

Each phage will attack only one virus, so you have to find the right one to be effective. The trouble with the broad brush approach of antibiotics is that certain viruses become immune to their effects.

That’s rather like different approaches to organisational problems. Broad-spectrum approaches can be applied, often with good effect - but not always. We recommend taking care to find the solution that works uniquely for you.

The focus is on the reporting and how The Sun newspaper in particular led a campaign against the social workers involved in the case.

It captures neatly the double bind that pressurises social services even now. They can be attacked for being all too ready to snatch children away from their families. And, as in this instance, remiss in allowing children to stay in the harm's way of their dangerous families.​

If elderly people are moved into sheltered accommodation or care homes, they suddenly face many problems, often including a sense of dislocation. It would be easy to discuss or investigate how bad this problem is, exactly what troubling effects it leads to, and other problem-focused lines of inquiry. Another option would be to do something worthwhile to give the new residents more of the feeing they want - of something familiar.

I was talking with Dutch colleagues, who told me of one care home which took photos of their residents' old front doors, printed them life-sized and used them to cover each of the residents’ respective new front doors. The residents found this helped them enormously. Very neat! What could better prompt that feeling of being at home (given that you no longer can be), than returning each day to your own front door?